The price of embedded hardware development boards has been dropping. What used to be $4000 boards have been steadily coming down over the past few years. Today you can get a beaglebone for $45.
Sure I like low cost hardware, but I kind of feel that has the possibility of reducing innovation, instead of increasing it. Sounds like an oxymoron…that would mean that something that is free will wipe out the willingness to innovate. Think about it…
The problem with silicon vendors coming up with a low cost board is that *nobody* else can come out with a board that can compete. Why, because the silicon vendor is subsidizing the development, and maybe even giving free parts to the manufacturer who is building the boards. That means, any customer of the silicon will never be able to build the board at the price they are buying it for.
Take this to the software side. Free software has become, well, free. Gcc has become the de-facto compiler standard, gdb the de-facto debugger but is it a great compiler. Does it even need to be, nobody else is going to build one. Companies that worked on building optimizing compilers simply stopped doing them. Is GCC a good compiler?…take a good hard look, do you really know of another.
Linux has been around so long (I first saw it in 1996) there are two things we could expect, that it became a mature operating system, or it went away. So why are so many people all over the world today (this minute) building and rebuilding linux file systems. Sure it gives a great kick to say “I built the OS for that thing!” but did you? you just compiled it forever and ever and ever. How many competing operating systems do you see…and ask yourself, would you trust your life to it…
The only person who can pay for “free” is somebody with a lot of money. Operating systems will make applications free, silicon companies will make BSP’s free…why, because it’s not their crown jewels. What are the chances that google will make ads free? 🙂
Can anybody build a rasberry pi competitor and sell it for the same price…likely never. which means nobody who builds a product with the rasberry pi will ever be able to build a product that uses the chip. What they can do is write software for the processor, which is what the chip vendor who supported the board is looking for. People who write software…
But then software is free, and people who work on it do it for free, and all the software they wrote is kind of version 0.8 for the last few years, and they all go out and buy new low cost boards to “play” with.
So what’s this innovation that we keep hearing about. Innovation happens when there is some incentive…something tangible…like money maybe?
Samyeer Metrani 